Explore the work on this website

“archive of destruction : department of CIS”  is a website format virtual branch of the archive of destruction – a piece Pedro Lagoa has been working on since 2007. The archive is a repository of documentary and fictional texts, images, films or sounds, that signal physical, ideological or symbolic acts of destruction. Operating as an anti-monument, this work neither celebrates nor glorifies destruction: it embodies the singular paradox that encloses the notion of safeguarding, for future recollection, a series of deeds designed to promote erasure, ruin or annihilation.

Every Thursday, over the next few weeks, the archive will be updated with new entries. The public is thus invited to pay regular visits to the archive and to freely navigate its growing contents.

The archive of destruction first came to the public eye in London, in 2007. It has since then been developed and it currently holds several departments and sections, an education service and an editorial stamp. Amidst sporadic appearances and ephemeral presentations, it was seen in: Gasworks, London (2014); Serralves Museum, Porto (2014); Boavista Gallery, Lisbon (2012); Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi-do (2010); Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2008); Formcontent and London (2007).

"The subject of destruction is bound to raise particularly sensitive ethical questions. The archive deals with this inevitability in the only possible way: by working the increasing volume of its contents so as to insure that the slightest hint of moralism does not come between them. This entails, on the one hand, that they must be protected from anything that may convey an element of judgement and, on the other, that they must be presented in such a way that allows viewer’s subjectiveness to flourish in the intervals between them – a space imbued with a sense of freedom and extrapolation that is at the very root of this piece.

This project, commissioned for Culturgest’s website, is an integral part of a series of initiatives that seek to address the circumstances inflicted by Covid-19. The pandemic imposed upon us an image of destruction quite different from the one we have become used to. This is not a spectacular destruction, nor does it seem to happen in real time. Quite like the coronavirus that causes it, the destruction imposed by Covid19 is rather invisible and guileful: it settles unnoticed and its damages are delayed. At the same time, the measures put in place to minimize it seem to threaten dispositions and values we took for granted. The world that will come out of the pandemic will surely be different from the one we were used to. Dealing with that difference and building on its rubble will be an effort that is all the more lucid if we recognize the workings and the ambivalence of destruction itself."

Bruno Marchand